Lane’s phone is a BlackBerry with a pink silicone case that feels like a toy in her soft hand. The screen displays three unread messages.
One from Shelley: can you pick up the girls around 9? they are at the mcnally house on lorimer ave—you met marcia at the ballet recital last thurs
From her mother: how R U? how is VA? we miss U call tmrw morning.
And Red: 10:30 still good?
She texts Shelley and says sure. She texts Red and says 11. She scrolls quickly through her email and finds nothing but junk. Marketing from J. Crew and Abercrombie. Some bank that has approved her for a credit card she did not apply for. Tonight is Saturday and tomorrow will be her day off.
Lane is living in a pool house with a kitchen and a bathroom. Shelley and her husband Jerome keep all of their pool furniture in a shed on the other side of the yard during the off-season. In the pool house there is instead a medium-sized bed for Lane to sleep in and a small green couch which she has never sat on and a big wooden table for eating at.
The drive to Lorimer Ave is brief and gravelly, about ten minutes. Inside the McNally house, which looms with brown brick and yellow iridescent light, she exchanges small talk with Marcia’s nanny and then the nanny goes upstairs to fetch the girls. The girls shriek and plead and Lane is glad that she has remained in the foyer. Marcia herself is nowhere to be found. Lane examines the canvas sprawling across the entry wall. Red and black paint gurgle together and induce vertigo. She searches for something to hold her gaze, something like a coil of color that might slither through the surface and pull the thing together like an undercurrent or a thread, but finds nothing, only texture and disarray.
The girls are wired on sugar and discursive on the car ride home.
Katie showed us how to make ourselves pass out, Lucy says.
For a second right before, right before I passed out, Amber says, it felt like I was flying. It felt like my eyes were popping from my head, Lucy says.
Mm, Lane says.
Her mind is elsewhere, on the brilliant moon which flits in and out of the dark tree line. The white of it seduces her and she keeps forgetting to look at the road, would have run straight into the startled doe if Amber and Lucy hadn’t pointed it out. She slams the breaks so hard the whole car hurtles to the right, roaring and screeching against spiky pavement. By the time they have stilled, the deer has already disappeared into the woods and the girls are no longer yelling. The moon is full and close, seems to be just at the end of the street.
+
Lane enjoys spending time with Red because he practices radical honesty and in rare moments of his own vulnerability and shyness, fails to meet her gaze. His eyes are light blue and loosely shaped, like melting ice ringed in shadow.
When Red tries to explain hunting to her, she tries to understand: she says, I support it as a concept but I could never kill a deer. I’ve seen Bambi. He says that there is nothing more beautiful to him than a bird in the sky but that he was still born with some impulse to make it stop flying. It’s not been something he could ever resist.
She asks him, is that how you feel about me?
He says, winding her brown hair around his wrist and tugging lightly, like do I want to kill you?
She shrugs and says, metaphorically of course.
What is killing a metaphor for, in this case, he asks.
She lets him find out. They are in the bed of his truck and she grips his forearms with all of their still-fresh purple holes. The truck smells like velour drenched in cigarette smoke and diet Pepsi and the onset of rain. It’s midnight in a Virginia spring and a yellow film coats every surface. Soon the rain will come and wash the pollen into the mud and by morning it will have settled thickly again.
The ceiling of Red’s truck is fabric and flies made of feathers pin the passenger-side sun visor. The feathers are emerald green and indigo and caramel. They flutter when the windows are down and catch the daylight. Lane longs to touch them but is afraid to because they feel slightly alive in the way that a very delicate sculpture can irritate the energy of an entire room.
When she asks him about fly fishing, Red does not concur with Norman Maclean’s four-count rhythm through which flows grace, God, and art. That is to say, he concurs with the four-count rhythm, just not with the romantic notions of grace, God, or art. He believes in these things, actually, as he believes in romance as a theory, just not in their relation to fishing. To him, fishing has always been a violent impulse, no different from hunting any other animal, purely predatory. He himself feels no less animal than the prey he baits.
Red is not easily surprised and his resting heart rate is so low that she struggles to hear it even with her ear pressed right up to his chest, but still she tries. She texts him pictures of herself straight out of the shower and tells him that she has never even killed a spider, subscribes smugly to the catch and release philosophy. He smiles with a benign sort of charm and says that he will take her to the Baltimore aquarium someday.
Also in the passenger-side visor are several James Taylor CDs. These Lane feels comfortable touching and does. She pulls the disc booklet from its clip and fans it out every time she’s in his truck. Red always lets her pick. Sweet Baby James is her favorite, Gorilla is his. Lane’s mother used to sing Fire and Rain to her as she fell asleep, and the feeling that song brings back is summer-night-warm, like ripe oranges off a tree or bubble bath. In the month she’s known him, Lane and Red have listened to all of the CDs several times through, have spent many hours together in his truck.
Angry Blues is already playing when he picks her up at eleven tonight. He’s quiet as they drive, and Lane is not feeling all too chatty herself. She’s stoned, in fact, off the weed he grows but doesn’t smoke. I can’t help it if I don’t feel so good, James Taylor sings, if I had my way I’d be sitting on top of the world.
Red doesn’t announce things before he does them hardly ever. When the situation obligates him to, such as before ejaculating, he does so with impatience and brevity. Lane enjoys the thrill of guessing why he stops the truck when he does. Sometimes it’s to show her a hidden stream or a corn maze, sometimes it’s just to take a leak.
+
After their first date, which took place at a coffee shop, he drove them to his parents’ farm. On the drive, he told her about the last three years of his life and she told him about her family.
Where are we, she asked, as he pulled up a gravel driveway.
They’re out of town, he said, as though in response, and led her to the chicken coop where he selected twelve brown freckled and sticky eggs for her to take home. The hens clucked in circles and two dirty beagles barked and licked her cheeks as she fumbled with her purse and pockets. He handed her an empty carton from Food Lion and she felt immediately relieved, grateful more than anything that she hadn’t asked for it and still he’d known.
He introduced her to a small donkey named Sassafras, who was friendly and smelly and blind. She walked right up to the sagging fence and sniffed Lane’s face, allowed Lane to stroke her springy ears. Sassafras, Red told her, used to smoke weed with him back in the days when he indulged. Once, years back, she had taken a puff of the bowl he had been smoking and laid herself down to sleep right there in the crumbly dirt.
You wanna go fast? He grinned at the four-wheeler parked outside the barn. Leave the eggs in the truck, he said.
Lane drove, her fingers gripping the throttle and his on her hips, soft tingling contact above the waistband of her jeans. Wind tugged at her face and Red’s breath warmed her neck. She could feel her heartbeat in her wrists, hot and dizzied by this strange man’s proximity, his intentions both murky and inevitable. They careened through tall grass and plowed down a bush. Tiny birds scattered; blackberries burst beneath their fat four wheels. When they pulled to a stop, Lane gasped as though she’d been running.
What do you think? His voice crackled through the dusky amber field.
It feels like driving drunk, she said.
He said, I was drunk when I learnt how to drive it. She turned to face him and without warning he kissed her. His smiling mouthful of bashful broken teeth.
Beyond the field, there was a ravine, a long dip of dead grass and dirt, and some rocks too. Standing near the edge and looking over it into the trees, they could see purple smoke emerging dreamily from a burn pile that Red had been smoldering for weeks. He’d put several lawn chairs and two felled trees into it, as well as a large number of receipts that his mother had been hoarding for the past decade. Lane asked if they could drive down there, if she could throw woodchips and gasoline-soaked rags at the pile, but he said no.
+
Tonight, he pulls over on the side of a gravel road and just gets out, leans against the driver’s side door. He doesn’t look up at the full round moon but it drenches him in a light that makes Lane briefly close her eyes, blink, like against the sun. She circles the car and leans against his warm rough body.
+
It feels like having muscles but no limbs, of having veins full of poison. It’s late autumn and not yet cold. The feeling is the exact color and pattern of the brown dead foliage. The feeling is of thrill and fear, of the sun on sleek, dry skin. The heat in the earth, in the air, shifts with each breath and subtle twist.
It feels the rustle against the branches more than hears it. Tastes the brown mouse’s fur off the wind more than sees it. The beat of a tiny heart emits waves of heat, like the ripples around a pebble in water.
A kill occurs in three counts. The first transpires within: a spark shivers from the brain down a nerve and pulses through a sac behind the yellow eye, which blinks. The second is a surge, which inhabits every atom in the body, every strain of tissue in the muscle. The third is simultaneous, a plunge, itchy and orgasmic, into flesh, and a release, a coursing, angry explosion of fluid. An emptiness, a flash of shame, then nothing.
+
One morning earlier that spring, Lane helped Red pick out a new phone at the Sprint mobile store, which happens to reside inside of the town’s gas station. His old phone had a bent antenna that no longer fully retracted. Red doesn’t like being in stores much, comes off as cold to sales associates. Lane is excellent at being in stores.
The woman who helped them that day was named Lesleigh, and she darted between the Sprint counter and the gas station counter as though she were playacting. She was short and buoyant with a streaky blonde pixie cut and she liked saying No biggie! whenever they thanked her for anything.
Well that’s an interesting name, Lesleigh said as she rang up the purchase. Red cleared his throat and nodded.
You have an interesting name too, Lane said politely.
Aw thanks, Lesleigh said, squinting her eyes and snapping her gum. It’s pronounced Le-slay, actually, she said, clicking away at her computer. Like sleigh bells ring-a-lin.
Pretty, Lane said. Red stared up at the fluorescent ceiling lights without blinking.
Alright darlin’, your card went through, just had to try it a few times. Lesliegh slid Red’s debit card over the counter with French-manicured fingers and shimmied themacross the orange plastic: click-click-click. Might wanna give your bank a ring, she added, let em know you made that purchase.
Thanks, Red said. I’ll do that once I have the new phone.
No biggie, Lesleigh said, and snapped her gum again, re-immersed in the computer screen. Lane tried to catch Red’s eye, but he had already begun to edge towards the door.
They waited on a bench outside the store for his contacts to finish transferring from the old phone into the new one. He was playful and calm under the metal awning and windy sun. He listed all the ways that he did not want to die. Lane said that she was okay dying any type of way except getting shot up in a dark movie theater. Red said that he didn’t understand gun freaks.
Remind me how many guns you have, she said.
Besides the point, he said. I own guns but I’m not a freak. There’s a difference, and anyway, I don’t even have a handgun.
Because?
Because a shotgun is more effective for home invasions anyway, for self-defense from a distance. A bunch of little bullets shoot out instead of just one, so the target radius is much larger. Red made a circle with his forefinger and thumb to demonstrate the size of this hypothetical bullet hole, and as he spoke, Lane thought of her grandfather who used to construct miniature churches for her with his interlocked fingers, wrinkled and slow. Here is the church, here is the steeple. Open it up and look at all the people. She wondered if all the gaps in the things she knew could be filled in by someone like Red.
What exactly are your intentions here, sir? She said to him, smiling at the way the word sounded in her mouth, like a forked tongue unfurling. Sir, she repeated, what exactly are your intentions with me.
Not long after Red dropped her back off at the pool house, she received a text from him. It was a photo from his new phone of a thick spotted snake, coiled under a tree. The caption was simply: !!! She replied: !!! She paused, zoomed in on the photo, then sent another one: copperhead?
Her fingers hovered over the keypad. She wanted to say something else but nothing seemed appropriately intense or witty enough. Finally, she asked the question, because it was the only thing she could think of: r u gonna kill it?
He didn’t answer for a while. She put the phone facedown on the table and sat on the bed. She lay back against her pillow and thought about taking a nap. She closed her eyes and breathed slowly for several minutes but sleep did not come, not even when she held the in-between breaths for ten seconds, as she’d learned to do at a wellness retreat she’d attended with her mother. From the edge of the bed, she could reach her phone on the table. She had a missed call from her mother and a text from Red.
The text said: i thought it looked magical that night when it bit me, 2day its just brown
She turned her phone off.
+
Red goes hunting in the autumn. Hunting is mostly about silence. The swamp noise hums just louder than his own soft heartbeat. He listens for the flush of feathers above.
Pulling the trigger, at peak tension of the hunt, never feels so distinct from reaching for his hat, running his fingers through his own hair, or slipping a needle into his vein. To impress her, he tells Lane that his Winchester semi-automatic feels like an extension of his body while he’s hunting, but the truth is that in other moments, outside of the woods, he feels like he’s walking off-balance, like he’s missing something not so obvious as an arm but as important as an ear.
When he aims at a moving bird, he accounts for not only the time delay between shot and contact, but also for the moment just preceding the shot, in which adrenaline blinds him, another few inches off from the mallard’s position in his present line of vision.
The killing itself is an explosion of control. For an instant, there is balance. The trees breathe a sigh of relief; fury emerges from the earth and evaporates into the humid air. Red holds the still-warm and throbbing body in his gloved hands and all of the death inside him flows through his fingers and soaks into the bird.
He got sober a year ago. He shot heroin for two years before that. And at the beginning of that first year, he was in the Richmond emergency room on a full moon taking oxy up his arm for the first time, his vision white with the pain pulsing up his left leg from two pinprick incisions just above the ankle.
+
The cold night is seething and alive. Inside the skin, the feeling is warmth. Beneath it, the dirt crackles with a nervous electricity. Noise warps in the moonlight, stronger than usual. The feeling is unease, hypertension, something about to go wrong.
An unnatural crunching, higher-pitched than wood, followed by the heavy snap of branch underfoot. The smell is abnormal too, sour and sharp. Distorted sound and the musk of something large and dangerous. A surge of fear, each muscle flexes and contracts.
+
Standing against his truck that Saturday night, under the moon, with Lane pressed close, Red finally speaks: I had some friends that year, friends I got high with.
What happened to them, she whispers.
They’re dead.
All of them?
I don’t know, he says. To me they’re as good as.
Lane thinks that this man feels sturdy and old, heavy feet planted flat in the earth like a tired dam, that he could block any wind, that his legs and shoulders could even change a current.
The next morning, she wakes early and waits on Red’s porch for him to take her back to the pool house. Under weak sun, everything feels flimsier, watery, more crack than concrete. From where she sits, she can see his fenced-off garden of cheerful marijuana plants in the little yard. Next to the garden he’s planted a juniper sapling and its green branches peek through the ground, all prickly and unsure.
Lane cries a little into an overflowing ashtray and touches the cigarette butts with her pinky finger. One of them disintegrates and the pile concaves slightly. She thinks she has never wanted a drink so badly, so early in the day. She wonders how easily Red would be able to quit a thing like her. She kicks her bare pale feet over the railing and thinks about the danger of not reaping what one sows.
Lane calls her mother back when she gets home. It’s Sunday. She’s been avoiding this because her mother is psychic and can hear Lane’s thoughts through the cell tower satellites.
Darling, have you been seeing someone? her mother asks before saying hello.
Hi Mom, Lane says.
We miss you so much. Daddy sends his love, he’s at the store. Well? Have you?
You seem to have your assumptions, Lane sighs.
Frankly, you’re just not that difficult to read, Lane. Tell me about him.
He hunts, she admits. And he says things as he sees them. But I’ve really only known him a month.
Well. Her mother says. Connecticut misses you.
A beat of silence then Lane says: how has Dad been?
Oh, you know him, darling. He’s no walk in the park. But no, he’s been good to me, none of that old stuff. It’s been years now. Stop worrying.
Lane doesn’t say anything, twists a loose thread in the duvet.
Does he drink, the boy you’ve been seeing?
His name’s Red, Lane says, thinking there is no point in trying to withhold now. He’s sober.
Sober?
Yes.
Well. Her mother says, and then they are silent.
+
On Mondays, the girls are demons. Waking them up for school is such a nightmare that Lane dreads it all week. Shelley is in the kitchen, making coffee. She asks Lane how her day off was and Lane says that it was nice, she got to relax and spend some time outdoors. That’s so nice, Shelley says. So, so nice. Isn’t it just beautiful down here. Lane accepts a mug of steaming coffee. Shelley pats her arguing daughters on their curly heads and goes upstairs to finish her makeup. Jerome hides behind his newspaper at the table.
By the time she gets some scrambled eggs and toast into the girls, buckles them into the BMW with their lunches, and waits for them to finish waving furiously out the window at their father, who is getting into his car as well, Lane is exhausted. Amber is hyper and Lucy is pouting.
Remember the deer you almost hit?
We weren’t even close, Lane lies.
Can we get ice cream later?
It’s barely even eight in the morning, Amber. Let’s see how you feel later. She sparks the ignition and rubs her temple.
I’m gonna tell Mommy you almost hit a deer.
Lucy kicks her sister and Lane ignores the screaming, hums quietly to herself.
She drops the girls off at the elementary school bus circle and watches them hobble across the sunlit concrete, their pink and purple backpacks too large for their bodies, causing them to bump drunkenly into one another. Teachers stand outside the building with arms outstretched as they beckon the children and the buses ahead of her on the driveway out are muddy and yellow. The radio is playing Norah Jones.
Come away with me, on a bus, she sings, as Lane drives through the dappled country roads. Come away with me where they can’t tempt us with their lies.
+
Red shows her how to water the juniper sapling, how to trim the marijuana plants. He asks her if she’s ever seen the footage of Neil Armstrong bouncing like a balloon along the surface of the moon, singing loopy nonsense.
Of course, Lane says. Everyone’s seen that video in school.
I don’t know what they teach you kids up there, he says.
I didn’t know you believed in the moon landing down here, she says back.
Well, he says, I can’t say if it’s real or not. But the way he is in that video, the way he acts—that’s how heroin felt.
+
The hot and loud entity is closer now. Fear paralyzes, but only for a moment. Any closer, this bumbling, reeking thing, and the other instincts will ignite.
A shift in the air, some waning, throbbing light, a tug deep within the muscle and from beyond the atmosphere and out of the swirling frothy tides off the coast and a panicked confusion of pain and silence. The thing takes its step.
A spark shoots down the brain through a synapse. An impulse sets off a chain reaction and the coiled snake unfurls in a flash. Across the leaves as fast as night and with just the slightest sound. A gaping cavity, a lighting snap, a plunge of razor-sharp enamel into flesh. A gurgling release, a flash of shame, then nothing but ecstasy and freedom.
–
Seonah Kim was born and raised in the Hudson Valley of New York. Currently, she writes and lives in Charlottesville Virginia, where she is obtaining her MFA in fiction writing from the University of Virginia. She is also a waitress and a teacher.
© Seonah Kim, 2025
Halfway Down the Stairs 